Performance & reliability
What uptime should I expect from a VPS?
Our SLA is 99.99% per instance, which permits about 4.4 minutes of downtime a month, and observed availability across the fleet over the last twelve months was 99.993%. Anything beyond that requires redundancy you build yourself — a single machine, however good, is a single point of failure.
Read what an SLA actually covers. Ours covers network and hypervisor availability, and credits are automatic once a breach is confirmed. It does not cover your operating system, your application, or a firewall rule you wrote.
The gap between 99.9% and 99.99% is the difference between 43 minutes and 4.4 minutes a month. If that matters to you, the answer is three instances in three regions, not a larger single instance.
See also: Hypervisor · SLA
7 answers in Performance & reliability
- What is CPU steal time and why does it matter? Steal time is the percentage of time your virtual CPU was ready to run but the hypervisor gave the physical core to someone else. It appears as the "s…
- Why is my VPS slow? In order of likelihood: memory exhaustion causing swap thrashing, disk IO saturation, CPU steal time on shared cores, an unoptimised database, or netw…
- How much latency should I expect from a VPS? Within a metro, under 5 ms. Within a continent, 10–40 ms. Across the Atlantic, 70–90 ms. Europe to Asia, 150–200 ms. Antipodal routes, 250–320 ms. Lig…
- How many visitors can a VPS handle? A well-configured 2 vCPU / 4 GB instance serves a static site to millions of monthly visits, a cached WordPress site to roughly 300,000, and an uncach…
- How do I benchmark a VPS? Measure the three things that actually vary: single-thread CPU with sysbench, disk with fio at 4K random read/write, and network with iperf3 to a know…
- How much faster is NVMe than SATA SSD? Roughly five times the random IOPS — about 500,000 versus 90,000 — and around five times lower latency, under 0.1 ms versus about 0.5 ms. Sequential t…